I'm in the middle of Haruki Murakami's Wild Sheep Chase. I always think I'm not in the mood to read one of his, but after about five pages, I can't stop. My girlfriend just finished What I Talk About... and she seemed to enjoy it, but she's also a runner.

i need to re-read wild sheep chase and dance, dance, dance for a second time and in the right order.

i finished "angelica's grotto" by russell hoban over the weekend. 72 year old man struggling to regain his inner voicer gets mixed up with the woman who runs the porn site angelican's grotto just to make his life more complicated. funny in ways, but also bleak.

about half way through "life of insects" by victor pelevin.and started with the interview material in "disease of lanaguage" by moore and campbell.

In real life, Pablo is the beer-swilling, hash-smoking, bacon-swallowing, croissant-craving, shower-avoiding black sheep of his immensely wealthy family. On the web, he's a reasonably well-known philosopher and he spends most of his time posting on the Metaphysical Club, but not many people know about that, including his family. The disappearance of his succesful, uptight brother triggers a surreal investigation that leads to forbidden and hilarious pleasures.

One of the most quotable novels ever. A cross between Crooked Little Vein and A Confederacy of Dunces.

Hokkaido Highway Blues by Will Ferguson - about one man's attempt to hitch-hike the length of Japan, north-to-south. Not quite as light in subject matter as the cover & writing style might lead you to believe, but incredibly easy to read.

That book made me want to read Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata but the library only had a really crummy translation of that so I drifted a bit to Narrow Road To A Far Province by Basho which I'd been intending to read for a while anyway.

Still chipping away at Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. Very mixed feelings about that man.

Reading Lieber's "Lankhmar" (Orion's omnibus edition), Grimwood's "End of the world blues" and just getting ready to bite into Simmons' "Song of Kali".

First three books of Jordan's Wheel of Time are still waiting for me on the shelf after almost a year because I got stuck at the last third of the first book. Frankly I find the very idea of trudging throgh ELEVEN books like that...unappealing.But I might change my mind one day, I don't exclude that option.

I've just started Japrocksampler by Julian Cope which is in a sort of timeline mode at the beginning. I'm hoping it breaks down into something like Our Band Could be Your Life, which is a book that I highly recommend.

I've also put Kavalier and Klay on my list again in the hopes that I can actually finish it this time.

also Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. i got to "The Library of Babel" yesterday and fell in love, but there are so many other amazing ones ("Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "Funes the Memorious" ...) that i can't help but recommend the whole collection. these are way better than the first few stories i read in The Aleph And Other Stories, which were mostly accounts of gunslingers and sad women.

i spent most of today hunting in libraries and bookstores for A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari. i read the first few sections, filled three notebook pages with notes, and then realized i had to own it. this week i have a few more bookstores to check out before i start looking for copies online. it reads like a drug-fuelled pisstake of all philosophies, all anythings, and a proposal of every alternate system of being that could possibly or not possibly exist.

ummmm then the next library book is Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason which is all about gin and politics and society in the mid-1700s in England. i want insight into the legislature and legality of self-pleasing/harming....

AND for anyone in Toronto, the Sci-Fi collection at the kids' library at College and Spadina has a steampunk exhibit (not much of one, since it's essentially some books inside glass cases - whoever heard of putting a book in a glass case?!) that'll be up 'til April. i had never been to the collection before (i got out L Ron Hubbie's first two stories that involve the theories of dianetics) and the people both behind the counter and using the materials seem pretty neat. i might make more regular appearances.

@256 yeah i've read fremder, read most of his stuff, though ironically not riddley walker, which seems to be his big classic.& i've also read that will ferguson book, enjoyed it a lot.

@allana i need to get on with the borges collection i have, i think fictions. i think he requires to be read in a certain way to get into the pacing/subtlety of the work. though certainly some pieces just click instantly.

I thought the same thing inre: parenthetical wordplay. It's like assuming your audience is too stupid to get you're making some kind of literary pun or allusion. Considering it was published by MTV's book publishing (heh) I'm not surprised. And I also thought it ruined the flow of the read. I mean, how would you say those things if you were reading it out loud? With a wink and a nudge?